


Dust

by lochlander



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Post-Dragon Age: Inquisition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-09
Updated: 2015-06-09
Packaged: 2018-04-03 15:49:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4106407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lochlander/pseuds/lochlander
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She loses her name, somewhere in the dust. No one to call her by it, no one to remind her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dust

She loses her name, somewhere in the dust. No one to call her by it, no one to remind her. Days and nights of wind and sand, drowning out word and thought until there is just her and the wastes. She loses Warden, she loses Hero, she loses Commander, and she loses Amell.

Those names are lost easily, drifting away as she treads onward. She clings to the important ones. The names she never gives the few errant wanderers she meets, but the ones she still whispers under her breath and the stars, hands curled against her chest, the words a shield against the cold and the night and the dust that threatens to swallow her whole.

My Love, My Only, My Dear, My Everything. Names whispered at twilight and murmured at sunrise. Names muttered under breath in crowded rooms and shouted from empty rooftops. Spoken breathless in conflict and silken in bedsheets and broken in farewells. Names given to her by a man so bright he rivals the sun.

But even those names are lost after days and nights and weeks and months, and then there is only Ellie. Only he ever calls her Ellie, only he is permitted. It is more his than hers and it is short for something else, but that doesn’t matter. She forgets that she is Warden, Hero, Commander, Amell, My Love, My Only, My Dear, My Everything, but she clings to Ellie, to the person she is, to the person he loves.

She is Ellie as she traverses the West, as she discovers secrets and pasts and sights destined for the rare few, in search of a secret hidden by time and loss and pages never written. She is Ellie as she skirts dragons and delves into tombs; as she peruses libraries and the bones of cities, lands once green and lush and now nothing but dust, faded and lost, nameless. Almost like her but not quite yet, because she is still Ellie. She is Ellie as she searches for the secret, a secret that may save her life if it does not drift through her fingers like the dust that everything else around her has become.

The secret belongs to someone whose name has been lost so very long ago, but she still has a name and it is Ellie and she holds onto it because she knows that when she is done she will return. The secret will be hers, but she will not be like the one who left it. Her name will live on because they will live on, the two of them, in sunshine and happiness and life with no fear of the encroaching darkness that threatens to taint their very souls.

When she finds it, she knows. The secret, her bounty, prized oh-so-carefully from the vice grip of time and darkness and blight. The name of the secret-keeper has been lost to the dust, but the secret remains and she can go back now. Returning is faster – she knows the way now and the brightness of his memory and his name call to her like a beacon across the endless waves of sand and emptiness.

When she returns, the names return. Warden, Hero, Commander, Amell, spoken in soothing, apologetic tones, meant to be gentle, meant to be comforting. They say his name too, over and over again, and the name of another, with a glowing hand and the Maker at her side. Their voices are vibrant, living, no dust in them, but the West has swallowed her whole, her soul and her voice and her name, seeping into her blood and her mind and now there is no one left to remind her of who she is.

She doesn’t respond to the names. She forgot them in the sand and she lays no claim to them now. She only has one name, one word, spoken in a halting whisper so very long ago, as she said goodbye to the sun and to her life. There is Ellie for so long and then there is only dust and she forgets that too, loses it to the decay that she thought she could outrun.

The living world is a petty trick by the Maker, a lie to convince her that there was ever anything more than emptiness. The bright sparks of life and fire, cities made of flesh and blood, fields so green they glow in sunlight, are nothing more than dust waiting to happen. The world is a dust bowl and she is nothing more than a mite, drowning in it, searching for a beacon of hope that resides only in her memory but felt so very real. A beacon that remains, even when her name has left her.

She loses her name, somewhere in the dust.

But she will never lose his.


End file.
